Bringing Rocky to Life: How ‘Project Hail Mary’ Puppeteer James Ortiz Created the Movie’s Lovable Alien

When Ryan Gosling interacts on screen with his alien buddy, which he does for more than half of “Project Hail Mary,” he wasn’t staring at a green screen as cameras rolled. Instead, he was playing off of an elaborate puppet manned by James Ortiz, a New York theater staple best known for bringing cows, mammoths and dinosaurs to life in Broadway shows like “The Skin of Their Teeth” and “Into the Woods.” In fact, Ortiz was on set for nearly all of the film’s six-month shoot in London, because directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller wanted to use practical, instead of digital, effects as much as possible.

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“Actor to actor, I didn’t want Ryan to ever feel like he was alone in this,” Ortiz says. “It would be too hard. I mean, he shouldn’t have to make character decisions for a strange, faceless creature.”

The two men rehearsed each scene before bringing out the puppet so they could get the blocking nailed down.

“That would be our one chance to check in with each other, see each other’s eyes, and sort of figure out the beats,” Ortiz says. “Then we’d layer the puppet in.”

Ortiz, lanky, with his hair swept up into a pompadour and glasses that make him seem like a Soho gallery owner, is telling me all this as we search for a quiet place to chat at Film at Lincoln Center, an arthouse cinema steps away from where Ortiz worked on “The Skin of Their Teeth.” It’s harder than you’d think. The café we tried first was cacophonous, filled with lunch-goers and blaring music. Then we huddled in a lecture hall, but got kicked out when a tour group came through. Finally, we sit on the floor just outside of a theater playing “Sirāt,” a Spanish thriller with an electronic score that punctuates our discussion with synth sounds. Ortiz is wearing a “Batman Forever” crew sweatshirt, a wrap gift from Gosling.

“We would have lunch on set and because we’re two boys of a certain age, we would talk about Batman,” says Ortiz. “You don’t have enough print for me to describe how much I love ‘Batman Forever,’ but it got brought up frequently. On my last day, I get a call to go over to the director’s tent, and Ryan intercepts me with this package. I couldn’t believe it. The gift just speaks to Ryan’s generosity and the fact that the man really listens.”

Rocky, a spider-like creature who speaks in whale songs and has the physiognomy of a boulder, arrives after the first third of “Project Hail Mary” to help Gosling’s school teacher figure out a way to save earth from an environmental disaster. Despite his unconventional appearance, Rocky is sure to be the breakout star of “Project Hail Mary,” and Ortiz is partly responsible for making him so irresistible. Along with the designer Neil Scanlan, he had to figure out a way to make a creature who lacks a face or the usual means of expression, somehow relatable.

“Rocky is super intelligent and has a mind like a computer — you never have to say anything twice to him,” Ortiz explains. “He’s a brilliant engineer. But his soul, to me, always felt like that of a little brother. There’s a little bit of this anxious, 14-year-old boy who really wants to be invited to the party.”

Scanlan, who worked for Jim Henson’s creature shop and on “Star Wars,” made it clear that even though he had built Rocky, Ortiz should feel free to make the character his own, telling him, “I’m going to treat this like you’re Frank Oz, and my job is to build Yoda for you.”

To make sure he was comfortable with the puppet, Ortiz spent months in pre-production giving feedback on how the creature should be constructed so he and his team of puppeteers could operate it more fluidly. The “Project Hail Mary” crew also designed the set to accommodate Ortiz and his colleagues, making sure that everything was built four or five feet off of the soundstage floor, so that they could cut a hole in the floor when needed. For certain sequences, the production relied on a fully animatronic Rocky, and in more complicated shots, VFX firm Framestore was relied on for the CGI.

“As you can imagine, puppeteering rolling in a ball through a ship would be pretty impossible to pull off,” Ortiz says. “That’s where digital effects come into play.”

Although Rocky doesn’t speak our language, the film has Gosling’s character create a machine translation system so the two can communicate. On set, Ortiz would recite Rocky’s dialogue from a sound booth so Gosling could have a scene partner.

“Rocky’s voice comes out of a series of computers that have been sort of duct-taped together, so I though it probably shouldn’t sound great,” Ortiz says. “I thought it shouldn’t sound like the top AI you ever heard. There should be a little bit of Mr. Moviefone and a little bit of Siri, only not as clean.”

Ultimately, Ortiz thought that Lord and Miller would choose a higher profile actor to re-record the dialogue in post-production. But as the directors screened the film, they used Ortiz’s tracks and felt it couldn’t be improved upon.

“Getting that call was incredible,” Ortiz says. “I’d convinced myself it wouldn’t be me.”

Though the production was filled with technical challenges, Ortiz says that Lord and Miller made a point of making him feel like part of an ensemble.

“What I loved about the process was at no point did Phil or Chris or anybody on the team ever treat me like I was a technician, or like a plumber who was brought in to fix a specific thing,” Ortiz says. “At every point they would ask, ‘what do you think, would Rocky do this or that?’ And I’d think about it and tell them how exactly how Rocky would feel.”